DailyDirt: Keeping Food Around Longer... And Longer

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Civilization has greatly depended on the our ability to store food for long periods of time. Without various food preservation techniques, our daily lives would be much different. Perhaps we've strayed a bit too far away from fresh foods, but the benefits of refrigeration, preservatives and food packaging probably outweigh the costs. Here are just a few articles on the topic of food preservation to ponder while you enjoy your next processed meal.

Twinkies are back.

Woo-hoo. No thanks. I'll stick with Little Debbie Cloud Cakes. They're the same dang thing, but a better value. You get more (15-some oz. Cloud Cakes vs. 13-some ounce Twinkies) for less money. Sorry, Hostess, but in your absence I moved on.

Spent ten years as a nation wide reefer driver (my own tractor and trailer), and refrigerated storage and shipping really is a different world. Loading apple in August that were picked the last Sept and stored in a refrigerated warehouse. Delivering frozen beef to the caves near Kansas City, watching the refrigeration unit on the trailer suck down fuel as it runs continuously trying to keep the ice cream in the trailer at minus 20 F in Phoenix when it's 115 outside.

And that was the good side. Sure am glad I'm not in that business any longer.

Re: Trailer Full of Reefer

I was one of the few that didn't use illegal drugs to get the job done, Diet Coke and Cigarettes let me cover the miles. Now, suffering the effects of cancer and chemo, I wish that Indiana would legalize medical marijuana. Not that I worry about getting busted anyway, the State would not want to pay my medical expenses. :D

Why Such Cheap Stuff?

I dare say I've spent a lot of time living in urban, ethnic neighborhoods, but my notions of food porn are more classy than Twinkies. You know, Greek Baklava, blackberry jam pastries, coffee rolls made with maple syrup and walnuts, pecan fudge, Amaretto Toast (a sort of cookie which used to be sold in Italian bodegas, flavored with anise), stuff like that. And of course Pepperidge Farm cookies, which are essentially a mass-produced form of haute-cuisine French pastry cooking. I've always thought of Hostess Twinkies as something cheap and nasty, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, served to a captive audience of children on school outings, back before the schools got the nutrition bug.

Re: Re: Trailer Full of Reefer

food

Does anyone else remember the show Dinosaurs by the Jim Henson? One show was when they celebrated "Refrigerator Day". The story was that the refrigerator was the backbone of dinosaur civilization. It allowed them to form a culture instead of just foraging for food all the time. Cool show, wish they would bring it back.